Months later the archive, and a lack of knowledge about the memorial sculpture, still troubled me so I wrote a letter, translated into Catalan, to the Mayor of Port Bou offering to give my services to improve the archive by, at the very least, getting all the titles translated into several languages. The reply, when it came, was from a Senor Vancells who had responsibility in the Ajuntament (town hall) for the Benjamin legacy. It may have had something to do with the poor English into which it had been translated, but the gist of it was they were not interested. It also said words to the effect that, 'We do not know why Walter Benjamin chose to die in Port Bou.' This seemed at odds with all I had read about the events of the 25 and 26th of September 1940.

The story of his untimely end is now well-known. Having moved to Paris in 1933 to avoid Nazi persecution, he was again under threat when the German forces were about to take Paris. Like many Jews and others fleeing Nazism he moved south looking for an escape route. With documents ensuring his access to Spain and a visa for the USA he proceeded with two others to the French town of Banyuls, a few miles from the Spanish border. However to cross the border it was necessary to make a long detour, on foot, across the Pyrenees and then proceed to join the railway at the Spanish town of Port Bou. There the Spanish authorities raised some issues about the group's travel documents. There were problems and were told they would be returned to France, and certain arrest, the following day. They were put under 'house' arrest in the Hotel Francia. Benjamin was an asthmatic with heart problems and he carried a supply of morphine for self-medication. He was not fit and he carried a large briefcase filled with his papers, manuscripts and notes. He was found dead the next morning. After his burial in the cemetery in Port Bou his companions were allowed to continue their journey and eventually reached the USA.

The route taken to escape from France had been used just two years before by Republicans escaping from Franco's armies INTO France. It was known as Route Lister, named after the republican general who organised the retreat. Benjamin's guide was a young Jewish woman Lisa Fittko. Raised in Vienna and Berlin, she had also made it south and was living between Port Vendres and Banyuls. She had learned of the route over the Pyrenees from the socialist mayor of Banyuls and Benjamin came to see her to ask if she would guide him and his two friends over it. In her autobiographical memoir, 'Mein Weg Uber Die Pyrenaen', she says, 'Benjamin travelled slowly and steadily; at regular intervals - I think it was ten minutes - he halted and rested for about a minute. Then he continued on at the same constant pace. As he told me, he had thought it all out and calculated it during the night: "I can go all the way to the end using this method. I stop at regular intervals - I must pause before I am exhausted. One must not completely overspend one's strength." This was the first of many trips over the next seven months that Fittko undertook guiding many refugees to safety. When it became impossible to continue she and her husband finally escaped. She lived the rest of her life in the USA dying in Chicago in 2003 at the age of 94.

Gershom Scholem, in his book on his relationship with Benjamin, 'The Story of a Friendship', says, 'After all I have told here it is evident that Walter repeatedly reckoned with the possibility of his suicide and prepared for it......Despite all the astonishing patience he displayed in the years after 1933, combined with a high degree of tenacity, he was not tough enough for the events of 1940.' From the beginning doubts have been raised about the actual cause of Benjamin's death. The notes of the doctor who attended the scene and the death certificate are inconclusive. There is even a recent film entitled, 'Who Killed Walter Benjamin?' which adds further to conspiracy theories. Fifteen days after Benjamin's death his companion, Frau Gurland, wrote in a letter to Theodor Adorno, 'At 7 in the morning... (I) was called down because Benjamin had asked for me. He told me that he had taken large quantities of morphine at 10 the preceeding evening and that I should try to present the matter as illness; he gave me a letter addressed to me and Adorno. Then he lost consciousness. I sent for a doctor, who diagnosed a cerebral apoplexy; when I urgently requested that Benjamin be taken to a hospital....he refused to take any responsibility since Benjamin was already moribund.' For myself it remains the suicide of a man who knew the consequences of a return to France. His struggles to keep going and to survive ended in Port Bou.